well why not

August 24, 2010

I didn't put these up because I find it lame that the only time I stretch the sketching/doodling muscles is when I send someone a thank-you note! But since any amount of exercise is better than NONE, here they are.

gamboling

July 11, 2010

A speedy drawing of my dogs. Fastest I ever whipped something up, well almost. I like how BB on the left looks but I overdid Max's face on the right. And I still have much to learn about rendering Westies well!

nasturtium

June 21, 2010

Happy Summer! Here is a drawing of a nasturtium from my backyard.

for the tastebuds

I didn't know how to utilize a handful of 2"x3" canvases I had, and then images of my favorite hot sauces, and consequently my favorite beer popped up in my mind and demanded to come to life. So in between the outer space paintings I would paint one or two. Painting tiny is painstakingly difficult. 2"x3" is pointless!

I want to live in outer space.

June 7-13, 2010

Blank canvases piled up and gathering dust in my room, extra free time with the arrival of summer, as well as constant stimulation and inspiration from my computer's rotating backgrounds of images compiled from years of archived shots from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day prompted me to sit down and try to capture the depth, the lights and darks and the overall awesomeness of the things astronomers spot in the night sky. These aren't so much creative endeavors, but more of a series to improve my technique, my eye for color and my brushwork.

send me artichokes

May 11, 2010

My mom came back home one morning last month with artichokes from her friend's backyard! After being obsessed with them all spring, my love for them has still not wavered. They are beautiful and delicious.

my friends in their rooms - 2

May 5, 2010

my friends in their rooms - 1

May 5, 2010

I find private dwellings, especially the ones of a few good friends, utterly fascinating, because a person's room can tell so much about the occupant. For these if I'm lucky to have some reference photos on hand, they're based off that, otherwise I make things up. Roughly 50% real, 50% imagined.

more blankets tributes

August 2008

The drawings I drew but never sent as I had hoped to, to Craig Thompson, whose work blew me away after my friend Dan handed me a copy of Blankets to read.

doodles 1

February 2, 2010

This will be an ongoing series of snapshots of doodles I neglect to scan. The graph paper book is one that I share with my friend Steph - we started in high school, writing and drawing to each other and passing it off to each other in-between classes. It was a definite catharsis and here we are in college, still carrying on. My silly side definitely comes out in full-force in my doodles to her.

reading girl

February 2, 2010

I think I need a bigger sketchbook since it seems I can't stay within the boundary of a 5"x8" page. I also need to work on the human form and physiology - my figures always look so stiff.

happy critter friends

December 2005

I painted these for my friends one Christmas out of a rare stroke of inspiration. I was happy about the underwater creatures, but my land animals need a lot of work! The recipients of each painting were all very grateful, which made the whole day I spent painting them completely worth it.

found

c. 2003-2004

An unfinished illustration of a polaroid of my friend Steph that I started in high school. At the time I was infatuated with the work of Adrian Tomine, and if you look closely at the line work I think that is slightly evident, or else a bit of a stretch, ahha.

underwater dining

c. 1998

As a child I loved to concoct whimsical scenes of underwater life (and of course many other things) and I'd imagine my own kinds of angelfish, sharks, coral - whatever, and all in the brightest, most vibrant colors. I'm most amused by this one because I can still remember which fish of each group I had drawn first just by pinpointing the one that's most carefully drawn. There would have been a second drawing after this one with all the fish inside said 'restaurant', but I guess the urge for that slipped away as the inspiration for other drawings surfaced.

I'll be posting some of these old drawings because I recently found a huge cache of them upstairs and, when I'm in a production slump I like to look at how I've evolved and remember what it was like being carefree and drawing all my afternoons away.

oak

January 26, 2010

I carved this on a 3"x4" piece of linoleum. It is based off of an Ansel Adams photograph of an oak tree. The original photograph is amazing, and I tried to capture the luminous quality of it through the carving. I can't quite say I succeeded, but I am satisfied in the very least with the shadows of the tree.

arowana!

January 18, 2010

The arowana of the freshwater bony fish family Osteoglossidae is one of my favorite fish, because its strange oblong yet thick body, covered with huge armor-like scales makes it look prehistoric. Plus they come in a large array of colors, which I failed to show in this sketch, but instead began to convey with texture.

various ♥s

January 18, 2010

My sister got me into drawing parts of the human anatomy - specifically the skeleton and muscles. Which is much more valuable practice than drawing hearts, but I found an image of many different anatomically-correct hearts that I was compelled to draw.

westie sketches

January 18, 2010

When I want to draw but my creative juices are lacking, I instead sketch to improve my line quality, going off of references rather than my imagination, which I believe is better than sitting there waiting for an idea to come. Today was one of those days, and I worked on quite a bit of these kinds of drawings.

I definitely need to practice rendering fur.